If there is a difference this time, it is one of degree. Taking part in programmes for Western and Russian outlets, I have been struck by the completely opposite views held on either side, starting with the fall of President Viktor Yanukovych, and whether you believe he was ousted in a popular uprising or toppled by an anti-democratic coup.
The difficulty, though, stems not only from the different ways in which most of the West, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other, have reported the same events. Nor is "disinformation" entirely to blame. There is something else, too: problems in interpretation, specifically between Russian and English, have helped to widen the gulf in understanding. Quotations are misconstrued; terminology is misleading, and translation into English has lacked necessary nuance.
Let's start with perhaps the best-known and in some ways most damaging misinterpretation. Time and again, since Russia annexed Crimea, Western commentators have returned to a snippet from President Vladimir Putin's State of the Nation address of 2005 in which he described the collapse of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical disaster of the /20th/ century". The distinction between two forms of the superlative in Russian — in this case, "samaya krupnaya" and "krupneyshaya" — can be left to grammatical purists — though it was the second form that Putin used, and it was translated by the Kremlin as "a major disaster", rather than "the greatest catastrophe", which was the version Western news agencies preferred.
The problem is less the technical translation of Putin's words than the construction that has been placed upon them. Outside Russia, almost everyone who cites these words does so to support the view that Putin sees it as his mission to restore something akin to the Soviet empire.
Few note the passage that followed — a catalogue of Russia's post-Soviet suffering as a result of the collapse not of the empire, but of the state. Still fewer set Putin's words against his answer, in an interview for German broadcasters just a month later, when he said that "those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart, and those that want to recreate it in its former shape have no brain".
Since then, Putin has said many times that the Soviet Union is the past and that there can be no return, but his words have fallen mostly on deaf ears. For the West, it is the view of the Russian president as an empire-rebuilder that has stuck, and largely determined its view of Russia and Ukraine.
The "greatest catastrophe" quotation may be the most damaging example of misunderstanding between the English-speaking and Russian speaking worlds, but there are others. Chief among them might be Putin's off-the-cuff comment in September that "if I want, I'll take Kiev in two weeks". The remark, in a phone conversation with the outgoing head of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, was leaked to the Italian paper, La Repubblica. The Kremlin spokesman objected that it had been taken out of context.
The difficulty, though, was more than one of context. In English, the remark was ambiguous. It could be interpreted as a direct Russian threat to Kiev. More likely, though, it meant that Russia could have taken Ukraine if it had wanted to — which, by implication, it did not. As so often, many Western observers jumped to the more negative conclusion.
Now things become a little more technical. Staying with Putin, but not only with Putin, there is the tricky Russian word "narod". Putin used it, answering questions about Ukraine at the 2013 Valdai Club meeting. Russia, he said, recognised Ukraine as an independent and sovereign country; at the same time, he insisted that Russians and Ukrainians were "one ‘narod'". Half-listening to the English translation, I heard the interpreter pause, then plump for the word "nation".
This was regrettable, because it appeared to negate everything Putin had just said about recognising Ukraine's independence. "People" would have been far better. Better still, though, would have been the expression used, among others, by Americans and Britons about each other as "kin", which has no territorial connotations.
"Federalism" is another word that has proved troublesome, especially in Britain. For several weeks last summer, the UK media were using "federalism" to denote both the European Union's centralising tendency and the fragmentation of Ukraine, if the eastern states won a large degree of autonomy. What is more, both these — quite opposite — interpretations of federalism were seen as negative. The context dictated everything.
The difficulties presented by the word "federalism", though, were trivial compared with those attending the term "gosudarstvennost" — which may or may not mean "statehood". The word sprang upon the scene on 31 August, when President Putin called for talks on — among other things — "gosudarstvennost" in eastern Ukraine. Rather than being seen as the concession it was, however, the word was seized upon by the English-language media as proof that Russia wanted eastern Ukraine to be a separate state.
The term "gosudarstvennost", though, does not always and only mean "statehood" in the narrow sense. It has a similar relation to state ("gosudarstvo") as "governance" has to "government" in English. It can also mean the way an administration is organised, or the sort of "political order" that prevails, without implying an actual state. The translator, Sergei Tseytlin, wrote a superb analysis of the "gosudarstvennost" problem for ‘Russia Beyond The Headlines' on 8 September. He noted that the Kremlin spokesman had been asked for clarification by Russian journalists and insisted that Putin had not meant to imply statehood for the Donbass. By then, though, the English-speaking world had stopped listening.
The last point of contention I would highlight concerns the English word "separatism". Almost all Western outlets, including the BBC, have referred to those in eastern Ukraine who oppose the Kiev government as "pro-Russian separatists". The term strongly suggests a desire to break away from Ukraine, either to become an independent state or to join Russia.
It has never been clear, though, how far — or even whether — the opposition in the east was about separatism or about preserving their way of life within a more federal Ukraine. The wording of the 11 May referendum in eastern Ukraine did not — despite many headlines about secession — say anything about breaking away.
The question was: "Do you support the act of state self-rule of the Donetsk People's Republic?" ("Поддерживаете ли вы акт о провозглашении государственной самостоятельности Донецкой народной республики?") — which could be taken to mean almost anything, from independence through sovereignty to self-determination or autonomy. As so often, the English-speaking consensus chose to see it in the most negative, most internationally disruptive, light.
This account of misinterpretations and misunderstandings considers only the Western side, because these are the reports I am most familiar with. But it would be surprising if there were no parallels on the Russian side. Truth may indeed be the first casualty of war, but interpretation and translation surely come a close second.
